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FOSS-2007 @ TCE

The FOSS( Free Open Source Software) 2007 event is going on well at TCE. It was inagurated on the 8th of january and will conclude on the thirteenth. This six day seminar on FOSS is being attended by delegates around the state and this is the first of its kind being conducted here at TCE after I joined this college in 2004( May be this is the first ever time). The agenda included Installation of GNU/Linux (Debain), Programming tools, Networking tools, Debugging tools, Database tools, Web programming, CMS and so on. The resource persons included experts from the FOSS world, fortunately most of them being alumnis.

The first day of the seminar was made a ever-lasting event, as it was handled by Mr. Joe Steeve, a great FOSS enthusiast and GNU/Linux user from Chennai. Mr.Joe Steeve,now working at Terminus Graphics Studio, started with an introduction to FOSS philosophies. Then he gave a brief overview about the various licences in the FOSS world. He also spoke about the two FOSS models of software development- the Bazaar model and the Cathedral model.

The next day, we had Mr. Praveen doing the session on installation. He seems to have shown a demo of the Debian GNU/Linux.Unfortunately, we missed it. The afternoon sessions were lab sessions for the participants andwe had special lectures by the resource persons.

The third day was handled by an emminent person, Mr. Barathi Subramanian, a well known person in most of the GLUGs in india. But that too, unfortunately, we coudl not attend. We were in the midst of our internals 😦 But then had a chance to meet him and exchanged greetings. He was kind enough to share a lot materials that he had collected and prepared.

The next day of the seminar was the most unforgettable, being handled by Mr. Ananth Shrinivas, an alumni of our college, now working at the SUN microsystems. A great UNIX programmer, Mr.Ananth handled the session on debugging tools and in that process, taught us all a lot about OS internals. Mr.Ananth is usually seen as an extremely brilliant geek and was seen more so as he began his talk on various tools like gdb and valgrind, all available in Linux and could be installed in a Debian system be apt-get install valgrind.

The fifth day, today, was handle by someone with whom I know personally,- Mr.SenthilKumaran from the spikesource. An alumni of our college who finished BE CSE in the year 2006, is well known to most of the third and final year students here. Mr.Senthil Kumaran spoke on DBMS tools and web programming tools. In DBMS tools, he spoke about the 2 major DBMS used in FOSS world, MySQL and PostgresSQL. He also made special mention about small foot-print databases like Apache-Derby and SQLite.